By Ilana DeBare

The black cat named Totoro trained his bright yellow eyes on a Chestnut-backed Chickadee singing on a branch. The chickadee was only a few feet away. There was no windowpane between them. The cat could practically reach out and grab the bird.

The bird was safe.

Totoro was in his “catio” – an outdoor enclosure or patio designed to let house cats experience the sights and smells of the outdoor world, while keeping both birds and the cats themselves from harm.

“We have some of the happiest cats,” said Phil Price, a Golden Gate Bird Alliance board member who built the North Berkeley catio where Totoro was sitting. “They love to come out, sniff the air, sleep in the sun, and watch people walking their dogs down the street.”

The tern “catio” is so new that there’s no Wikipedia entry for it yet. It’s not listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Totoro watching a chickadee / Photo by Ilana DeBare

But the concept is catching on among cat owners who care about birds. Last fall, the Audubon Society of Portland sponsored its first Catio Tour, featuring twelve catios in the Portland, Oregon, area.

The latest scientific studies suggest that outdoor cats – both domestic and feral – kill more than 1 billion birds each year. A single domestic cat typically kills between one and 34 birds each year; one feral cat kills an estimated 23 to 46 birds annually.

Keeping cats indoors is the best way to stop them from killing birds. Keeping cats indoors also helps them stay healthy — safe from hazards like cars, dogs, and fights with other cats.

Catios, meanwhile, are a way to give indoor cats a taste of the outdoors.

Catios can be jaw-droppingly expensive and elaborate. Web sites like CatioShowcase.com feature some cat enclosures that could be mistaken for Hawaiian resorts.

Elaborate Utah catio featured on CatioShowcase.com Resort-like catio in Florida featured on CatioShowcase.com

But catios can also be inexpensive and homemade. That’s the case with Phil Price and Juliet Lamont’s Berkeley cat complex.

Price started out in the late 1990s by building a cage out of plastic PVC pipe and wire mesh on the roof of his garage, accessible through a cat door that he cut in a wall. He installed some potted plants and a cat climbing structure.

Then in 2003, he added an outdoor catwalk – a long wooden plank framed by PVC pipe and wire that stretches from his garage roof to the home of his sister-in-law next door.…

By Ilana DeBare
We’re excited to welcome Laura Gobbi as the new president of Golden Gate Bird Alliance’s board!
(Just to avoid confusion: This is not the Executive Director position, which we are still in the process of filling. Laura was elected to succeed Carey Knecht as leader of our 14-person, all-volunteer board.)
Laura, the Senior Director of Alumnae Relations at Mills College, brings a wealth of non-profit experience as well as energy to the job.
Even more important, she brings a deep love of birds and of GGBA!
“Volunteering for Golden Gate Bird Alliance has been amongst the most meaningful experiences of my life,” she said. “It is both inspiring and humbling to belong to such an incredibly talented and committed community.”
As a child in Massachusetts, Laura shared her mother’s love of birds. But she first became an active birder about ten years ago, when she was working for her alma mater Oberlin College in Ohio as director of its international travel program.
“That took me out on trips to places like Panama, Ecuador and the Galapagos,” Laura recalled. “People came on those trips to bird. It was very contagious… It’s ironic that I saw my first American Pipit in the Canadian Arctic. I saw my first quetzal before I knew what a creeper was!”
Laura became active in the Audubon chapters near Oberlin. When she moved to the Bay Area to work at Mills in 2008, she sought out Golden Gate Bird Alliance.
“I wanted to learn about California birds and get to know the park system, and to do that as part of a community,” she said. “I’m a living advertisement for all the classes that GGBA offers. I’ve taken Bob Lewis and Rusty Scalf’s Birds of the Bay Area class about eight times. I’ve taken Beginning Birding with Anne Hoff, owls with Dave Quady, and raptors with Eddie Bartley, as well as the 2013 Master Birder class.”
However, she’s never managed to get into Denise Wight’s popular Birding By Ear class. If you’ve also ended up on the waiting list, take consolation in the fact that you have the Board President for company.
“Getting into Denise’s class is harder than getting dinner reservations at the French Laundry,” Laura joked.
Her favorite “birdy” moments? Hearing the ethereal sound of a double-trachea Slate-colored Solitaire in Honduras. (See video clip below.) Waking up to the song of a Swainson’s Thrush in the Sierra. …

GGBA Executive Director Mike Lynes speaks out on behalf of wildlife and balanced uses of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in an op-ed in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (Friday, February 7). The following is a copy of his article.

GGNRA dog plan offers balance, protection

By Michael Lynes, Executive Director of Golden Gate Bird Alliance
Everyone agrees the Golden Gate National Recreation Area should be managed to balance a wide range of activities – picnicking, dog walking, jogging, wildlife viewing and more. But just what exactly is “balance”?
Right now, management of the GGNRA is tilted sharply toward use by dogs and their owners. Not everyone wants to be surrounded by dogs when out for a hike or a picnic. But there’s almost nowhere to go in the San Francisco sections of the GGNRA if you wish to enjoy the park without dogs. Dogs freely chase birds up and down Ocean Beach; Fort Funston has become a de facto dog run. Even after years of controversy, dog owners comply with leash requirements less than 30 percent of the time on Ocean Beach.
Dog-related recreation has real impacts on the GGNRA. At Fort Funston, it has contributed to the extirpation of some wildlife, including brush rabbits and California quail (San Francisco’s official bird). While a dog chasing a shorebird may look like fun, the bird is expending valuable energy fleeing what it sees as a deadly predator. Every year, the National Park Service records hundreds of attacks by dogs on wildlife, visitors, park personnel and other dogs.
Dog chases endangered Western Snowy Plovers at Ocean Beach / Photo by Alan Hopkins
The new dog management plan proposed by the GGNRA is a fair and thoughtful attempt to accommodate a variety of recreational activities in the most popular areas of the park, while ensuring that this urban oasis is protected for future generations.
Dogs and their owners in San Francisco will continue to have ample space for outdoor recreation. Under the proposed plan, the GGNRA will remain the only national park with any off-leash dog areas, and will offer more on-leash access than any other national park. In the San Francisco section of the GGNRA alone, there will be at least four off-leash dog play areas and more than 21 miles of on-leash areas, including trails and beaches.
That’s in addition to more than 28 official off-leash dog areas in the San Francisco city park system – more off-leash play space per capita than any other U.S.…

By Ilana DeBare
For the past couple of months, Golden Gate Bird Alliance volunteers have been monitoring the small population of threatened Western Snowy Plovers that have taken up residence on Crown Memorial Beach in Alameda.
Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story, with a nice article by Carolyn Jones that featured longtime GGBA activist Leora Feeney and GGBA Executive Director Mike Lynes, as well as East Bay Regional Parks staffer Sharol Nelson-Embry. The Chronicle wrote:
“To the shock of naturalists and bird watchers, a flock of threatened western snowy plovers has taken up residence on one of the Bay Area’s busiest beaches. For the past few months, since the East Bay Regional Park District dumped 82,000 cubic yards of new sand on the beach, the fist-size shorebirds have been skittering across the dunes and pecking at bugs, oblivious to the frolicking hordes around them.
” ‘I was really excited when I heard. There aren’t many of these birds left, and here they are, so easily viewable and accessible,’ said park district naturalist Sharol Nelson-Embry, who works at the nearby Crab Cove Visitor Center.
Snowy Plovers at Alameda / Photo by Calvin Walters, http://calwalters.zenfolio.com/p826151533
GGBA volunteers have been working to point out the plovers to joggers and other passersby, so they can detour and avoid disrupting the birds as they rest and forage.  The Chronicle wrote:

The tan-and-white birds are nearly impossible to see and risk getting trampled by beachgoers and overly enthusiastic dogs. And if the birds decide to stay and nest at Crown Beach this spring, their offspring are highly unlikely to survive, creating what scientists call a “biological sink.”
“The birds would put all this energy into reproducing, and then lose every single baby,” Nelson-Embry said. “For a species that’s struggling, that would be a disaster.”
For now, the district is keeping an eye on the birds and hope they head south to the Hayward shoreline, a favorite nesting spot for the Bay Area’s snowy plovers, by March.

For tiny, threatened birds, the plovers seem remarkably fearless. Birder Calvin Waters photographed some last week, including a plover that had been banded for scientific tracking. With help from the East Bay Birding Yahoo group, Calvin contacted Point Blue (formerly PRBO) and learned about the banded bird’s history.
Snowy Plover with leg band at Alameda / Photo by Calvin Walters, http://calwalters.zenfolio.com/p826151533

…